Mr. Richards placed me in charge of one of the settlement's fresh-air camps, up the state. I had two other boys to help me in my work, and one of them was Frank Cohen. It had taken me a long time to overcome Frank's sensitiveness, after his encounter with my aunt; but we were fast friends again now, and it was good to have him with me where I could help him with his daily noon-time studying for his "preliminaries." When the fall came, he passed them easily—and it was now definitely decided that he would enter my college when I was a senior.
My own return to the university, however, gave me an unpleasant shock. I had arrived a few days late, because I had wanted to help Mr. Richards with some of his coming year's programs. The campus was already alive and crowded, therefore, and the dormitory windows were all thrown open and overflowing with the rugs and chair cushions of autumn cleaning. The campus teemed with a thousand youths who grasped each other cordially by the wrist and went through all sorts of contortions to prove that they "were glad to see you, old man!"
But there was a difference! The first glimpse I had of it, I called myself a self-conscious fool. I tried to reassure myself, everybody's greeting had been as cordial as I could expect. Everybody had said he was glad to see me—and—yet!
Then, the second day that I was at college, I had my first proof of the truth of my suspicions. I had it through eavesdropping—but I was justified. For I heard little Waters, the genial popularist, talking of it to another classmate in front of the laboratory steps.
"It's a rotten shame," he was declaiming. "Haven't you noticed? I don't see how it could escape you! Jews and Jews! The freshman class is just swarming with 'em!"
"What? Really?"
"Honestly. If there's one Jew in the freshman class, there are fifty. And such Jewy-looking Jews!"
"Gee whizz, it's a disgrace. It was bad enough when they used to come in four or five—or even ten—in a class. But fifty! Are there really fifty?"
"Oh, easily! Maybe a hundred—I don't know. They are swarming all over the place! Gosh, we'll have to do something to get rid of them. It just simply ruins the college name to have so many of them around."
"You bet! A campaign for ours!"